That episode was Carol Danvers' cartoon debut. However, it was almost beaten by a cartoon from a decade earlier, a cartoon where Carol would have been a member of the X-Men!

In the third season of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, the heroes team up with the X-Men (who had made a handful of appearances before this point due to Iceman and Firestar being former members of the team in this cartoon continuity) in "The X-Men Adventure"...

The episode was intended to be serve as a backdoor pilot for a possible X-Men cartoon series in 1983 (or whatever, 1984, I guess, you know what I mean, some time after that episode aired). That did not happen, but had it gone through, the plans were to also add Videoman, a character who had appeared in a previous episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends to the team...

as well as Carol, who would be called Lady Lightning, presumably because of the lightning bolt on her costume at the time.

Comics Scene #11, from 1983, explained, “The proposed X-MEN show from Marvel almost made NBC’s schedule and would have featured Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Ariel, Lady Lightning (an animated version of Ms. Marvel which has been kicking around for years), Thunderbird (back from the dead and able to change into any animal-form) and Videoman (???). Also the action would have them as students at Professor X’s high school. The show was passed over in favor of more Smurf-like shows."

Oh man, can you even imagine what Carol Danvers' comic book career would have been like if she had debuted on a network cartoon series as Lady Lightning? Obviously she would have been turned into Lady Lightning in the comics, as well. Would she ever have become Captain Marvel? Fascinating stuff.

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

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